Writing Blog 3- January 2022

 

I have just committed a major U-turn. I am now seriously considering converting The Obscurati Chronicles into an online serial. This is for several reasons. Firstly, I really enjoyed producing the four free samples. It felt so good that people were reading my content right away. I got a lot of positive feedback on it. I also had fun with the illustrations. I found it was a bit of a drag carrying on with the novel in the knowledge that nobody would read my words (except for two people; one friend whom I've been sharing it with and my running proof-reader) until the novel is published; and when will that be? I started writing The Obscurati Chronicles in August 2019. That means in two years and six months I have written only five and a half chapters. That is achingly slow progress. For comparison, between 2015 and 2018, just four years, I wrote the entire Roswell trilogy. Why have I since then shifted into such a low gear? Party it's because of the fact that the scope of this project already indicates it will be a very long book, possibly on the scale of Evan's Land. Also I have found myself unable to focus deeply enough due to events going on in the real world, as I detailed in the previous blog, that I've been covering on HPANWO. It could be that the world will calm down a bit in the future, giving me the mental space to detach from it again; but it shows no signs of doing so right now. Assuming my new project is as long as Evan's, at my current pace, the novel could take well over a decade to write, possibly considerably over. Do I have that kind of patience anymore? Also I have to ask the question; how much longer am I going to live? Long enough to complete the book? Forgive my melancholic tone, but over the course of the last ten months I have been mugged by reality when it comes to mortality. I have lost four people I cared about. Although I am not very old, neither were most of the people who died. I keep wondering who will go next, and will it be me? I don't want to leave this incarnation with such an endeavour as The Obscurati Chronicles incomplete. I also think a touch of laziness has settled on me due to the lack of urgency I feel because this work is very similar to the Roswell trilogy thematically. Mixed with that is the good news that sales of Roswell are steadily increasing at the moment, probably because of more serious news coverage of UFO's... I struck that iron while it was hot! You might argue that an incomplete serial is as bad, or even worse, than an unfinished novel. At least with an unpublished novel people won't go crazy trying to work out what was meant to happen next (like in this side-splitting Tony Hancock play: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoXFfTQkKbY). However, I think if I serialize the story I will probably finish the whole thing sooner because the knowledge that I only have to get through a single chapter before I present it to my audience will lift the burden I described above and give me more creative energy. An added bonus will be that it will free me up to work on other projects, such at adapting Ouija into a stage play, see: https://hpanwo-bb.blogspot.com/2014/08/ouija.html. What's more, just because I'm publishing the draft as a serial does not mean I will be abandoning the prospect of a book edition completely. Such greats as Alexandre Dumas, Elizabeth Gaskell and Charles Dickens first published some of their stories as a serial in journals, and they went on to double up as successful books. I already have Chapter Five finished so if I make the decision I think I'm about to make, I can post it straight away.
See here for the previous Writing Blog: https://hpanwo-bb.blogspot.com/2020/11/writing-blog-2-november-2020.html.